Joe Hill Interview: On Bringing ‘Abraham’s Boys’ to Life [Dread Central Digital Feature]
Our Digital Features are where we take the time to delve into something special, spotlighting the creators, films, and ideas that are pushing horror forward. These stand-alone interviews exist outside our monthly covers, allowing us to delve deeper into the projects we can’t stop thinking about. This time, we’re turning our attention to Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Tale and my recent conversation with Joe Hill, a Master of Horror, responsible for its frightening source material.
Joe Hill has always lived with monsters. But with Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Tale—a new Shudder-backed adaptation of his short story from 20th Century Ghosts—those monsters are finally stepping into the sun.
“I got paid 150 bucks for this short story 23 years ago,” Hill recalls with a grin. “So the idea that now it’s this terrific, Hitchcockian motion picture that’s about to land in people’s laps—it’s beyond thrilling. It’s kind of surreal.”
Directed by Natasha Kermani, Abraham’s Boys reframes the Dracula mythos through a slow-burn, sun-drenched Americana lens. Hill couldn’t be more proud: “She only had a little while to shoot the thing, tiny shooting schedule, tiny budget—that could’ve worked against her, and instead it worked for her. She made the film into this tightly compressed, hand-on-the-throat work of suspense that feels deeply Hitchcockian.”
Vampires have long stalked Hill’s imagination, but not in the traditional sense.
“I watched [Salem’s Lot] with my parents when I was about six or seven,” he says. “It absolutely terrified me—especially that fucking kid. Ralphie Glick, scratching at the window to be let in. That’s my king vampire growing up. It wasn’t Dracula. It was Barlow.”
Reaching that kind of primal fear, he admits, is rare now. “I’m pretty tough to scare,” he says. “I mean, I’m a horror guy. I went to go see some horror film with Christopher Golden years ago, packed with teenagers. Every time there was a gross-out jump scare, the whole theater would erupt. Me and Chris? We’d grab each other and start laughing.”
Hill is still a fan first, even if he’s become a bit jaded to the fear: “I don’t always respond to scares the way I’m supposed to. It’s part of being a horror fan. So when I see a really scary vampire on the screen, my response is not, ‘ahhhh!!’, my response is ‘awesome!’ I love it. I mean, every time I saw the count in Eggers’ Nosferatu, I loved it. For weeks after I saw that film, I was pacing around my office going, ‘I am nothing but an appetite!'”
And his Count impression is surprisingly accurate, all things considered.
While Abraham’s Boys traces its lineage to Bram Stoker, Hill emphasizes that the film and his original story play a very different game at the end of the day.
“I especially love Abraham’s Boys because it is a throwback,” he says. “It’s not playing the game that a lot of modern films play. It’s trying to play with the same kind of stuff that has made films in the past almost timeless.”
From a filmmaking standpoint, he compares Kermani’s approach to classics: “There are these quiet moments when you’ve got the western landscape and the glow of the sunshine. Brady Hepner is out there on the hill with his hatchet, and it feels like you’re watching a young Gregory Peck in some early color Western shot by John Ford. She even did some stuff with the aspect ratio to make it look like an older film.”
And in case the audience doesn’t notice the throwback style? “It’s weird. Self-consciously weird. And I love that.”
With Abraham’s Boys and The Black Phone both hitting audiences this year, the short story collection 20th Century Ghosts is having a bit of a cinematic moment. So, what would Hill adapt next?
“There was a short movie made out of Pop Art,” he explains, referring to a 15-minute short by Amanda Boyle. “It’s the story of a friendship between a juvenile delinquent and an inflatable boy named Arthur Roth. Arthur’s made of plastic and filled with air. He weighs six ounces, and if he ever sat on a sharpened pencil, it would kill him. It’s lovely. I wonder what that would look like if some of the Henson puppeteers made the art.”
But his darker side has another pick.
“I’d love to see Best New Horror adapted,” he says. “That story is a horror story for horror fans. It’s about a man who loves horror fiction and finds himself in a classic Texas Chain Saw Massacre-type scenario. Except rather than be terrified, he’s elated. He feels this tremendous surge of euphoria because he’s been waiting his whole life for exactly this.”
And if he could take a swing at someone else’s horror legacy?
“Maybe Straub’s Ghost Story,” he offers. “It’s a modern masterpiece. I think Straub’s Ghost Story is right there with the horror novels that were built to last. I don’t think it’s had the adaptation it really deserves yet… So someone hire me. I’m available. Call my agent.”
While Hill is often asked about his father’s legacy, Abraham’s Boys is all his—bristling with his love of horror, his reverence for folk myth, and his fascination with familial rot.
“You see something like all of Egger’s work, every film Egger’s has ever made, and certainly Abraham’s Boys has a little bit of that,” he says, referring to the British folk-horror wave. “It’s tapping into that folk horror vein.”And at the center of it, Hill sees Abraham’s Boys not just as a Dracula remix, but a film about stories passed down—whether we want them or not.
Abraham’s Boys is in select theaters now from Shudder and IFC.
Categorized: Dread Central Digital Feature News
